The lanscaped route to Wales

It was not that the M4 motorway was blocked but I thought I'd take a more leisurly route to give me an opportunity to get in some shooting. So I've added some photos from along the A4 including Hungerford, Marlborough, the Kennet and Avon Canal, and Wiltshire landscapes including one of those chalk White Horses and the famous neolithic Silbury Hill.

Jilted on my date with Naomi

I was writing earlier in the week about heading to Terminal 5 to get some photos yesterday - sure enough I was there yesterday afternoon; what I did not mention (because I keep these things to myself) is that I was meeting up with Naomi Campbell to take a few pics and discuss how I could help further her career if I could take a few pics of her doing lifestyle chores around my house. You know, hoovering, ironing, dusting.....

Anyway, while I was there, handbags happened.

So I had to make do with taking pics of the terminal. Which I can't load to this post because Blogger is being temperamental. So I put them on Photoconnect.

Heathrow Terminal 5 stock photos

Sorry, no photos of Naomi.

Passport photos - who needs them?

On the first day when I make LightTouchImages.co.uk the referral point for my Adwords advertising I get a request to do quick passport like (but smiling) shots for a firm in the City. Co-incidentally the government has decided today that a passport may well get you out of having a UK ID card and all this reminds me that I have not yet registered to get tickets for Glastonbury.

The Glastonbury connection? Well each and every person who would like a ticket has to register - here - (explained here) and to register you have to upload a passport-like photo. Registration does not get you a ticket but gets you into a draw to win the opportunity to buy a ticket - which if you win you do not have to take up if you don't want to. If you win and choose to go, you can take up to three other people - but they have to be registered too, but do not have to have won. The whole scheme is pretty well thought out as a way of stopping ticket touts.

I intend to take the harmless step of registering - even if I lose I might just find someone I know who wins, and if I win I will then have about three weeks trying to find up to three people who have registered and want a spare 'ticket'.

Once registered, win or lose, this "Passport to Glasto" lasts 5 years giving me the opportunity to win and get there one day. Of course I'll take the camera - I am sure I will get something rather more interesting than the current crop of Glastonbury photos on photoconnect. I quite fancy taking lifestyle pics of stoned not so trendy not so young things updating their blogs wirelessly from a tent in a godforsaken swamp in the West Country. Me, I'll have the VW camper (thank you).

But first I have to do some Glastonbury passport photos. I hate passport photo assignments.

Focus on Imaging at Birmingham NEC

So today was the annual trip to Brum to check out whether the ratio of beards worn by photographers still is three times the national average - and yes it is!

Aside from this vital observation I trotted around getting lost several times, always somehow finishing up at the Nikon stand (is someone trying to tell me comething?).

Mulling about in my brain is the issue of where to go with the mainstay of my equipment - the DSLR. Already possessing a Pentax K10D and a Canon EOS5D it may seem strange to be considering scrapping the lot and buying a Nikon D300 (I must write more on this soon) but at least I was using the show to help me make big decisions (OK, I normally just go to take candids of the models....)
Just what was going on with all those laptops anyway?

My day was interrupted by a surprise call from a friend who works in big deals at a big city bank calling to let me know that Getty Images had just been bought by a Private Equity group. Who knows what this means but perhaps a good time to get my images in before Getty reinvents itself ("I submitted to Getty in the good old days before they accepted images from riff raff with any old camera"). After all I bought the EOS5D to fit in with them and I will be heartily pissed off if new owners open things up to the likes of me (before I owned the EOS5D, that is).

Back to the Nikon stand where a couple of guys were explaining to a couple of hundred people about the wonders of wireless TTL flash. Strangely it was pitched as if this was something Nikon had just discovered and that the audience had never heard of. Strange to a Pentax user anyway whose cameras have had this technology for 10 years now but whose marketing team have felt it appropriate to keep it all very quiet....

I'm rambling now.